Cutlass and Cudgel

by George Manville Fenn

He must have come up quite fifty feet after ascending the slope along which he had walked, and here he was at the top of the flight of clumsy stairs on a kind of platform of rugged stones, and straight before him there was a chink so narrow that he could not have thrust a hand through it, but wide enough to allow the passage of a gleam of light; there was a familiar odour, too, of salt air and seaweed, and as he placed his ear to the chink he could hear, as if far below, the wash of water.

“Why, this must be at the side of the cliff,” he said joyously; and if he could enlarge that crack there would be a way out to the face of the rocks, where it would go hard with him indeed if he could not climb up to the grassy fields above, or down to the shore below.

“Why didn’t I try this before?” he cried. “Oh, how foolish! Not get out, eh? I’ll soon show them that;” and he began to feel about carefully all over the face of the stones before him, to satisfy himself before long that there had been a large roughly square opening here, which had been filled in with some pieces of stone, between which he could feel that there was mortar.

“Now, then, what I want is a good marlinspike or an iron bar. Oh, if I had my dirk here I could move them with that.”

But he had neither bar, marlinspike, nor dirk, nothing but his hands and a small pocket-knife, so a depressing feeling of vexation humbled him for a time.

He soon cast that off though, for it was impossible to feel low spirited in the face of such a discovery, and before commencing the task he had in hand he knelt down with his face close to the chink to drink in the delicious sea air.

“I wonder how long I shall be a prisoner,” he said aloud; and he laughed, for he could see no difficulties now. Still they began to appear soon after, and the first one he mentally saw was the coming of Ram with his food. He must know the place thoroughly, as he had shown by the care with which he threaded his way among the loose stones and pillars, and if he came with his lanthorn and missed him, he might walk up there and find him at work.

“I’ll be careful,” he said to himself; and taking out his knife forcing himself to believe that it was about twelve o’clock each day that the lad came, and if so, as it was about six hours, as near as he could guess, since the basket was brought, he had about a couple of hours more daylight, then the long night and all the morning, before his gaoler would come again.

He bitterly regretted now not having tried to time Ram’s visits, forgetting that it would have been impossible to do so without light, and, unable to restrain his impatience to the extent of waiting till he came again, and watching for night from then, he went to work to try and loosen a stone by the side of the crevice, and toiled away till at the end of what seemed to be two hours, the light through the crevice paled, grew dull, then dark, and for the first time for many days he knew that it was night.

Cheered by his calculation being so far right, he worked and scraped out the mortar, satisfied even with getting away the tiniest scraps, feeling as he did that if he could only dislodge one stone he could bring up from below plenty of great and splinter-shaped pieces with which he could hammer, and take out the rest, or enough for his body to pass through.